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Richard Powers doesn’t just write books; he crafts emotional and intellectual landscapes so immersive that by the time you emerge, you’re not quite the same person who began reading. Bewilderment is a novel of staggering beauty and quiet devastation, a book that shattered me completely.

Powers excels at balancing the grand and the intimate, interweaving environmental urgency with the deeply personal, and here, he does it through the relationship between Theo, an astrobiologist, and his son, Robin—a boy brimming with empathy, wonder, and the kind of raw intensity that the world has little patience for. The novel is a loose retelling of Flowers for Algernon, though instead of intelligence enhancement, Robin undergoes a neurological treatment that amplifies his mother’s essence within him. Watching him transform, blossom, and eventually break is heart-breaking in the way only the best literature can be.

Powers� prose is as breath-taking as ever, his sentences shimmering with poetic grace: "They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp." There is a childlike wonder at the heart of this book, even as it stares unflinchingly at our species' self-destructive trajectory. Theo and Robin’s imaginary planetary excursions—each a thought experiment about what life could be—are some of the most affecting passages, dreamlike in their philosophical implications.

But what hit me the hardest was how much Bewilderment understands what it is to feel out of step with the world, to be too sensitive, too attuned to beauty and pain. It captures the loneliness of high intelligence, the ache of being surrounded by people who never question, never wonder, never care enough. And it does all this while being, on the surface, a father-son story wrapped in a planetary elegy.

I could quibble about how Powers sometimes leans too much into his themes, but the truth is, I didn’t care. I was too busy feeling—something this novel demands, in all its breathtaking, heart-wrenching brilliance.